Woman who encouraged boyfriend to kill himself loses fight to appeal conviction

abc.net.au
Tue, 14 Jan 2020 09:31 UTC

© AP: Charles Krupa

Carter will be released on January 23 but her conviction will still stand.

A Massachusetts woman who goaded her boyfriend into killing himself with numerous text messages and phone calls has lost her bid to appeal her manslaughter conviction in the US Supreme Court.

The justices refused to hear Michelle Carter's appeal of a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling last year upholding her 2018 conviction.

Evidence in the trial showed Carter repeatedly urged her boyfriend, Conrad Roy, to take his life in 2014.

She was 17 and he was 18 at the time.

Carter's lawyers argued her conviction violated her right to free speech under the US constitution's first amendment.

Comment: Freedom of speech?! What a joke! That they would attempt to construe 'freedom of speech' to cover a psychopath convincing someone to take his own life just shows they are psychopathic themselves. Unbelievable!

Civil liberties advocates also raised concerns about the case.

It was the first time Massachusetts brought manslaughter charges related to texting.

Carter sentenced to 15 months in prison

In thousands of text messages, Carter encouraged Roy to "promise" to kill himself and helped him plan the event after he abandoned earlier suicide attempts.

"You just need to do it Conrad. The more you push it off, the more it will eat at you," she wrote in one text to him.

"You just gotta do it babe, you can't think about it," she wrote in another.

"You're just making it harder on yourself by pushing it off, you just have to do it," she wrote in another.

Carter was indicted in 2015.

© AP: Faith Ninivaggi/The Boston Herald

Authorities discovered thousands of exchanges between Carter and Mr Roy.

She opted against a jury trial, leaving her fate in the hands of Bristol County Juvenile Court Judge Lawrence Moniz, who found her guilty of involuntary manslaughter in 2017.

Moniz subsequently ordered her to serve 15 months of a two-and-a-half-year sentence in prison. She started serving her sentence after the appeals court ruling.

Comment: This sentence seems unbelievably light. The fact that her suicidal encouragements took place over text message is really neither here nor there. Repeatedly and judiciously convincing someone to kill themselves is akin to attempted murder.

See also:

• Teen who encouraged her boyfriend to commit suicide faces 20 years for involuntary manslaughter
• 'Involuntary manslaughter'? Woman who urged boyfriend to kill himself via text messages sentenced to 2.5 years in prison
• Psychopath alert: Teen girl on trial for manslaughter after she urged her boyfriend to commit suicide - which he did
• Psychopath alert: Massachusetts teen encouraged boyfriend to kill himself
• Budding female psychopath? Teen charged in encouraging suicide of friend before using his name for fundraiser

UPDATE: It seems there may be another side to the story. A series of blog posts by Peter Breggin, MD who testified on behalf of Michelle Carter at the trial. From Breggin:

I was the only psychiatric and medication expert on either side, and I testified on behalf of Michelle. Other than perhaps her lawyers, I probably know more about the true story than anyone else. This blog will be the first in a series of reports about the trial. Nearly everything in this series of reports was revealed and documented at the trial, often through my testimony. Documents for the Michelle Carter case and links to videos of the pretrial hearing and the later trial can be found in the case archive I'm creating on my website www.breggin.com.

While the media has been portraying Carter as a conscienceless psychopath who convinced her boyfriend to kill himself, Breggin makes the rather convincing case that Carter was actually in the grips of severe psychoactive drug side effects (Prozac) together with isolation and lack of parental supervision. His 6-part blog series starts here and is well worth checking out.